Aug. 5 (Bloomberg) -- Malaysia’s ringgit completed its
biggest two-day advance since June after gains in U.S. equities
boosted sentiment for emerging-market assets.

The Standard and Poor’s 500 Index rallied yesterday after
last week’s biggest loss in two years as corporate earnings beat
analysts’ estimates. Confidence also improved after Portugal
announced a bailout for Banco Espirito Santo SA. Malaysia will
report tomorrow that its trade surplus widened in June, a
Bloomberg survey showed.

“Overnight we saw risk coming back on partly due to the
Banco Espirito bailout,” said Vishnu Varathan, a Mizuho Bank
Ltd. economist in Singapore. The strength in the ringgit “is
accounting for the overnight optimism on Wall Street,” he said.

The ringgit has appreciated 0.8 percent since its close on
Aug. 1 to 3.1875 per dollar in Kuala Lumpur, according to data
compiled by Bloomberg. That’s the biggest two-day gain since
June 9. One-month implied volatility, a measure of expected
moves in the exchange rate used to price options, fell four
basis points, or 0.04 percentage point, to 5.55 percent today.

The ringgit gained as weaker-than-forecast U.S. jobs data
fueled speculation the Federal Reserve won’t be in a hurry to
raise interest rates, according to Macquarie Bank Ltd. Employers
in the world’s largest economy added 209,000 jobs in July,
missing the median estimate of economists for a gain of 230,000,
an Aug. 1 report showed.

“The market is now thinking that there’s no real need for
a near-term tightening,” said Nizam Idris, Macquarie’s head of
foreign-exchange and fixed-income strategy in Singapore.

Malaysia’s overseas shipments climbed 15 percent in June
from a year earlier, after advancing 16.3 percent the previous
month, according to a Bloomberg survey before the report due at
12:01 p.m. local time tomorrow. The trade surplus widened to
5.97 billion ringgit ($1.9 billion) from 5.72 billion ringgit,
the survey showed.

The yield on the nation’s 3.394 percent sovereign bonds due
March 2017 was steady at 3.47 percent, data compiled by
Bloomberg show. It has dropped five basis points in a month.